Exposure by Therese Fowler Page A

knew anything. He tried Amelia’s phone yet again, and this time the line didn’t ring, it went straight to voice mail.
    Anthony pounded the car’s roof once, then got in and headed home. He drove with little conscious awareness of the drive itself; his mind kept turning over the ways he might go to Amelia’s house before work, go see her, or see about her, without risking discovery. He could do as he usually did: park some distance away and then walk or jog through the woods, but the odds of him being seen by one of the neighbors whose property he’d be crossing were much higher in daylight, and he didn’t want some freaked-out old lady calling the police about a prowler. Or … maybe he’d try driving directly to Amelia’s house, telling the guard at the neighborhood’s entrance that he was dropping off homework. That should work as a onetime deal. Good, okay , he thought. He’d do that. That would at least get him there … and he could pull the same act with her mom, if she happened to be home.
    What he hoped was that for some yet-to-be-revealed good reason, Amelia had neglected to tell him she was going to stay home and take a nap. He hoped he’d ring the doorbell and after a minute she’d pad to the front door and greet him with a sleepy smile. He’d seen that smile once, when she’d slept over at Cameron’s house and he’d come by first thing in the morning, to join them for breakfast. He wanted more than anything to see that smile every morning, and he mentally marked, again, that he would be able to beginning about two hundred and ten days from now.
    On his street, he was nearly at his house before he noticed the Raleigh Police car stationed a hundred feet or so away. He pulled up to the curb and parked, thinking this was another case of a concerned neighbor requesting them to do some speed-limit enforcement. People tended to drive too fast on through-streets like theirs, endangering the kids who played outside on bikes and skateboards and scooters. He went inside and took the stairs two at a time, swung into his room, and booted up his computer to check his email. If for some reason Amelia’s phone had stopped working, she might have contacted him this way. He pulled off his navy V-neck sweater and sat at the table that served as a desk, waiting, tapping a pen against his palm. “Where are you?” He knew that only some crazy sequence of truths would lead to her being away from any kind of phone but at the same time near a computer, hers or any, but at this point, even crazy sequences of truths were worth hoping for.
    The hope didn’t last long. “Merde,” he said, when he saw that none of his new messages had come from her.
    When the doorbell rang a minute later, Anthony still had not connected the police presence to his own life. Expecting his grandmother, who often dropped in unannounced, he went downstairs and pulled open the door to find two blue-shirted cops waiting there. “Anthony Winter?”
    As implausible as it was, Anthony’s first thought was that they’d come to tell him Amelia had been hurt or killed. His breath caught and he choked out, “Yeah?”
    “We’d like to ask you some questions. Can we come in?”
    He stepped back and let them in. The three of them stood in the small foyer for a moment, and then one of the officers took out a notebook and said, “Would you confirm that you live at this address?”
    Anthony nodded. “What’s going on? Is this about Amelia? Is she okay?”
    The two exchanged a glance, then one cleared his throat and said, “We’ve had a complaint. What do you know about Amelia Wilkes being in possession of a number of photographs that feature you without … that is, in an unclothed state?”
    Anthony blinked, and blinked again. “Sorry?” He had not seen this coming, not at all, not in any way. Christ. How could the cops possibly—?
    Then the pieces tumbled into place. The forgotten computer. And … maybe Amelia’s mom hadn’t